Samuel Glasstone (Editor), The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 1st edition, June 1957. Obsolete information is excluded. This edition contains chapter on civil defense (chapter 12) which has vital photographs which were removed from the 1962/4 edition, while the entire chapter on civil defense was removed entirely from the 1977 edition (essentially because the U.S. Office of Civil Defense had been removed from U.S. Department of Defense in the 1970s, with civil defense taken over by FEMA, which had no role in editing this book whatsoever, since it was a joint DOE and DOD publication). It also contains a chapter on Worldwide Fallout which was removed from later editions (to make room for a chapter on the EMP and radio interference effects). Justification: http://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/

See also the 1964 edition: http://archive.org/details/TheEffectsOfNuclearWeapons

See also: The effects of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan (the secret U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report 92, Pacific Theatre) located at: http://archive.org/details/TheEffectsOfTheAtomicBombOnHiroshima

Compare to the civil defense material extracted from the June 1957 edition of "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons" at https://archive.org/details/Anderson_shelter

The 1977 edition of "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons" omitted the fire prevention evidence and photographs from the 1953 Upshot-Knothole ENCORE test which was included in the 1957 and 1962/4 editions, leading to the myth of "nuclear winter" due to firestorm mythology in 1983. It also replaced the "Principles of Protection" chapter with a new chapter on the EMP, leading to claims by Jonathan Schell in his 1984 book of New Yorker magazine essays, "The Fate of the Earth" that Glasstone's book disproves the possibility of surviving nuclear weapons effects.

Schell for example omits the simple improvised fallout shielding advice from the 1964 edition of Glasstone and claims that the 1954 15-megaton Bravo bomb fallout would doom anyone within a 7,000 square mile area, ignoring the fact that you have to remain outdoors in an unobstructed desert to get the radiation doses given in the 1977 edition of Glasstone's book. In addition, Schell's best-selling book misquotes Glasstone's range for threshold (small sized) retina burns to rabbits in aircraft exposed facing the fireball in a clear radial line-of-sight from the August 1958 high altitude 3.8 megaton Teak test at 77 km burst height, claiming falsely that the rabbits were blinded hundreds of miles from the 15 megaton Bravo surface burst. In fact, nobody had eye damage on Rongelap atoll, 115 miles from Bravo, although unwarned and unprotected.

The reason why Glasstone's book has been ignored or used for such false propaganda is that it is not very readable. This compressed summary aims to make the key facts clearer. The full text of all editions of Glasstone and Dolan can be read online at HathiTrust’s digital library, http://www.hathitrust.org/

See also 1964 edition condensed summary: https://archive.org/details/TheEffectsOfNuclearWeapons

plus-circle Add Review

comment

Reviews (2)